Chan Is Missing: Lost (and Not Found) in Chinatown

When Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing began to draw national attention upon its release in the spring of 1982, two important cinematic milestones were reached. First, as Wang’s solo debut film, Chan was instrumental in launching one of the more prolific and eclectic directorial careers of the past forty years. Wang’s independent films, such as Smoke (1995) and The Center of the World (2001), have often leaned more experimental than those of his contemporaries; his studio projects have rarely felt predictable, either, whether it was the Jennifer Lopez rom-com Maid in Manhattan (2002) or the gentle family melodrama Because of Winn-Dixie (2005). Second, on a larger cultural level, Chan became the first narrative feature made “by and about” Chinese/Asian Americans to gain widespread recognition and distribution—a genesis moment for an Asian American cinematic practice now into its fifth decade. Chan is more than just a first, however. Its enduring significance—and pleasures for the viewer—lie in how Wang distills a set of broad social themes through his intimate snapshot of San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood and its delightful panoply of personalities.

On the surface, the black-and-white film tells a simple story: Jo (Wood Moy) and Steve (Marc Hayashi) are a pair of Chinatown cabbies searching for Chan Hung, a friend who owes them money; a mystery (and hilarity) ensues. But atop that basic conceit are layers of complexity, whether in Chan’s genre-bending, its experimental storytelling, or its quirky but genuine-feeling characters. It’s no exaggeration to claim that American film audiences had never seen anything quite like Chan before, and even among Asian American films, few have resembled it since.

To properly put Chan into context, one must remember that, before the 1970s, the concept of “Asian American film” simply didn’t exist. Cast and crew members of Asian descent had been active in the movie industry since its inception, but it wasn’t until the Asian American Movement of the late sixties and early seventies that a socially committed, solidarity-driven, pan-ethnic ideal of Asian American–ness began to surge forth, especially in the realm of media arts.

One of the first narrative features to be informed by the movement’s cultural politics—promoting community empowerment and amplifying the voices of the marginalized—was Duane Kubo and Robert A. Nakamura’s Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980). A story of the Japanese American experience told through the memories of an aging immigrant laborer, Hito Hata never achieved the national profile that Chan would enjoy two years later, but the film’s focus on community history and social issues helped influence an Asian American media arts ethos that has since informed everything from Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride (1994) to Gene Cajayon’s The Debut (2000) to Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020), as well as several of Wang’s own post-Chan projects, such as the family melodrama Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985) and the historical dramedy Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989).

Chan Is Missing is in deep conversation with elements of that tradition, especially in how it insists upon the multivalence of Chinese American identity as a rejoinder to over a century of racist stereotyping. Chan’s title obviously mocks the now infamous Charlie Chan movies churned out by Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, wherein a string of white actors in yellowface played the heavily caricatured Chinese Hawaiian detective. Wang cleverly stages Chan as a mystery of its own as well, but it’s not just the plot that is cloaked in obfuscation.

Working alongside cinematographer Michael Chin and sound editor Curtis Choy (both now important Asian American filmmakers in their own rights), the director often deliberately crafts scenes that are in some way hard to see or hear. When we first see Jo driving his cab, a scrolling procession of Chinatown store signs reflects off the windshield, obscuring his face. During a meeting Jo and Steve have with Chan’s wife, a stereo blaring rock music makes their conversation almost impossible to hear. The film has often been presented without subtitles for the dialogue in Cantonese and Mandarin.

It’s as if Wang is thrusting the viewer into a state of confusion not dissimilar to the experiences of immigrants trying to navigate a new society, while also suggesting that that identity—Chan Hung’s or otherwise—isn’t easy to pin down or make sense of. Part of the brilliance of these moves is that, even if there’s a social agenda underlying them, they almost never feel didactic. In Chan, Wang deftly communicates uncertainty and unknowability through cinematic language while avoiding the kind of ham-fisted dialogue and performances often found in later Asian American features.

Part of what sets Wang apart is that, unlike many movement-influenced filmmakers, he was neither born nor raised in the U.S. As a Hong Kong native, growing up in a Chinese-majority population, Wang would have had a sense of self significantly different from that of his future Asian American peers. He was eighteen when he immigrated to the Bay Area in 1967, just a year before the multiethnic Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Berkeley, helped catalyze the Asian American Movement on the West Coast. Though Wang—who eventually studied film at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland—was aware of those college protests and similar social actions, he wasn’t directly involved in them.

However, over the course of the seventies, Wang would have many opportunities to interact with the local Asian American media arts community. Before Chan, he worked part-time for documentary doyennes Loni Ding and Felicia Lowe. His Chan collaborators included movement activists such as Choy and composer/musician Robert Kikuchi-Yngojo, and Wang found most of Chan’s cast through San Francisco’s Asian American Theater Company. Despite these interpersonal connections, Wang admits, “I respected what they did and think it was very important to tell our history. But these were not my priorities.” Instead, his inspirations came more from studying Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave, watching Yasujiro Ozu movies at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and attending guest lectures by Stan Brakhage at CCAC.

Under the sway of those influences, Wang’s initial conception for Chan was radically experimental compared with the version we know now. Wang had become intrigued by Sergei Eisenstein’s theories on how the evolution of Chinese calligraphy was essentially a form of montage, in which the juxtaposition of visual signs and symbols created meaning without needing to literally spell things out. When Wang began shooting Chan in the late seventies, his original intention was for the early parts to be just series of images, without dialogue or even sound. He meant to add those other elements slowly, paralleling Eisenstein’s theory of how the Chinese written language had gradually come into form.

However, once Wang took his footage to an editing bay at a San Francisco adult-movie studio, he realized, “I wasn’t good enough to make it all work . . . I could put together a half-hour film. But I wanted to make a feature, and it just didn’t hang together.” With input from Chin and Choy, and with the addition of a pair of cowriters—Wang’s then writing partner and future Hollywood screenwriter Terrel Seltzer and their friend Isaac Cronin—he spent the next two years reediting and adding voice-over narration from Jo to bring the film’s disparate parts into greater coherence.

For all those changes, the final cut of Chan still has more in common with experimental film than conventional Hollywood moviemaking, even if various scenes riff on popular genres such as detective movies and film noir. Wang did shoot an ending in which Jo and Steve actually find Chan Hung and get some answers regarding his disappearance, but the director realized that such a rote resolution felt incongruous with the rest of the movie. Instead, Wang decided that Chan needed to stay unfound and even unseen; in a Polaroid photo we see of the character later, standing next to Jo, Chan’s face is completely hidden in shadow, in keeping with the film’s other strategic obfuscations. (In actuality, this is Wang, in a tongue-in-cheek cameo.)

However notable the movie’s narrative and formal experimentation is, it’s ultimately in service of Wang’s lovingly rendered portrayal of the San Francisco Chinatown of the late seventies. Before Chan, Wang worked as an English instructor in a neighborhood job-training center, and much of Chan’s script drew from his quotidian interactions there. Most obviously, the characters of Jo and Steve were loosely based on real-life Chinese American cabbies Wang met when he was working on a semidocumentary that he abandoned to start on Chan. He also cast people to play thinly veiled versions of themselves. Early in the film, Jo meets with George, a language instructor who posits that Chinese-bakery apple pies are an apt analogy for Chinese American identity formation; George is played by George Woo, a San Francisco State professor whom Wang worked with in Chinatown. The fast-talking insurance agent whom Jo later meets with, Mr. Lee, is played by Roy Chan, Wang’s real-life insurance agent. As Wang puts it: “The characters in Chan were intended to create a complexity out of all the different characters that exist in Chinatown . . . [I was] trying to get at something authentic about these people.”

Wang’s attention to ethnographic-esque detail extends beyond just the characters. An early scene finds Steve playing what he calls “St. Mary’s Drill” on a Big Mouth Singers toy piano. At first blush, the scene seems like a bit of comic relief, given the toy’s admittedly silly design. However, anyone from Chinatown would recognize St. Mary’s as a local elementary school with a renowned drum and bell corps. When we meet the scene-stealing “singing cook” Henry—played by future A Great Wall filmmaker Peter Wang—he’s stir-frying sweet-and-sour pork, quaffing glasses of milk, warbling “Fly Me to the Moon,” and wearing a “Samurai Night Fever” T-shirt. Not only does his character have an eccentricity that feels rooted in deep specificity, but that T-shirt was an actual item sold by Japantown’s Kokusai Theater in 1979 to promote a samurai movie series.

In the forty years since Chan’s release, the community of Asian American filmmakers has grown immeasurably in size and diversity, whether its members are tinkering with self-produced shorts on the internet or helming tentpole franchise films. But while there has also been a corresponding rise in the amount of “by and about” Asian American films being made, the number of examples that gain national, let alone global, attention is still soberingly small.

As such, it can feel unintentionally minimizing to describe Chan Is Missing as one of the “most important Asian American films ever made” when the average moviegoer likely can’t name more than one or two examples, if that. Moreover, Chan also deserves to be called one of the most important American films of the past half century—no ethnic modifier needed.

Nevertheless, Chan remains a singular achievement within the cultural history of Asian America. Representation and recognition have been priorities in Asian American communities for decades, and part of the brilliance of Wang’s solo debut is its ability to present a small-scale story, set in a hyperlocal Chinese American community, with an underrated comic flair, and use that to lure the audience into an expansive treatise about social identity and belonging.

In the film’s haunting penultimate scene, a meditative shot of rippling water is interrupted by a voice-over from Jo, complaining about the myriad, diverging portraits of Chan Hung supplied by the people he and Steve met during their futile search: “The problem with me is that I believe what I see and hear. If I did that with Chan Hung, I’ll know nothing because everything is so contradictory.” Despite Jo’s frustration, that image of water—fluid and ever-changing—offers a quiet retort: people, let alone entire communities, contain multitudes; one can never pin them down to a single definition or representation. These complexities aren’t contradictions. They’re a reminder that identity isn’t a mystery to be solved, only an experience to be lived.

Portions of this essay draw on a 2022 Film Quarterly interview with Wayne Wang conducted by the author, who may or may not have a vanity license plate that reads “WNGONCB” in homage to the Wing On Cab company in Chan Is Missing.

Chan Is Missing: Lost (and Not Found) in Chinatown

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